Saturday, July 12, 2014

Henry Theophilus Finck, Epicure of Aurora

New York Public Library

Though he was born in Missouri and died in Maine, he was an
Oregonian. Though he achieved fame as a music critic and a popular writer about
the likes of Wagner and Chopin, he also wrote about food (Food and Flavor, 1913) and love (Primitive Love and Love Stories, 1899) and gardening (Gardening With Brains: Fifty Years'
Experience of a Horticultural Epicure, 1922) and travel (The Pacific Coast Scenic Tour, 1891). An
unusual man was Henry Theophilus Finck (1854-1926).

Henry T. Finck was born in Bethel, Missouri in 1854, into a
family that was part of a German religious farming commune headed by Dr.
William Keil. The nucleus of that group soon moved west, and founded the
community of Aurora, south of Portland. Finck grew up in that environment, and
through diligent study he managed to go to Harvard, graduating in 1876. After a
European jaunt, he began writing for the New York Evening Post; for four decades, he was a regular contributor to the
magazine The Nation, and he authored
more than a dozen books.

Among his writings are reminiscences of his childhood in
Aurora, and about the delicious bounty of the Willamette Valley. Here are some tidbits.

From The Pacific Coast
Scenic Tour

“Concerning Oregon fruit I can speak from personal experience, as
I was brought up near an orchard numbering two thousand apples, pear, and plum
trees. For peaches and grapes the climate of Northern Oregon is hardly warm
enough, and the apples and pears, too, are perhaps a little smaller than they are in California, but
in flavor they are vastly superior. Indeed, neither in the East nor in any part
of Europe have I ever tasted apples to compare with those in Oregon. … In most
parts of the East an apple is an apple, and few people know or care about the
names of the different kinds; but an Oregonian would no more eat certain kinds
of apples than he would eat a raw pumpkin. An epicure is no more particular in
regard to his brands of wine than an Oregonian is in the choice of his favorite
variety of apples; and there are half-a-dozen kinds which I have never seen at
the East, and the systematic introduction of which in the New York market would
make any dealer’s fortune.”

“… I must acknowledge that I have never tasted any French
chateau wine with a more agreeable bouquet than that of Oregon cider made
exclusively of the finest apple that grows—white winter pearmain—and kept in
bottles, unfermented.”

“In the matter of berries, Oregon is greatly ahead of
California. The delicious wild strawberries on long stems are so abundant in
May and June that they perfume the air along country roads like clover-fields.
Blackberries are even more numerous, and a single county of Oregon would supply
enough for all our Eastern cities.”

Sketch from Food and Flavor, by Charles S. Chapman

From Food and Flavor

“The Aurora hotel soon became far-famed; and when the first
railway was built from San Francisco to Portland, the astute makers of the
time-table somehow managed it so that most of the trains stopped at Aurora,
though it is but twenty-eight miles from the terminal, Portland.

“It was plain German bourgeois
cooking; but the sausages were made of honest pork and the hams had the
appetizing flavor which the old-fashioned smokehouse gives them; the bread was
soft yet baked thoroughly, the butter was fresh and fragrant and the pancakes
melted in the mouth. As for the supreme effort of Aurora cookery—noodle soup
made with the boiled chicken (not
cold-storage chicken) served in the plate—the mere memory of it makes my mouth
water, four decades after eating it.

“In justice to Portland, which in those days was in a
benighted condition fully warranting the action of the railway men in making
Aurora their culinary terminus, let me hasten to add that at present, with its
Chinook salmon and Columbia River smelt, its hardshell crabs and razor clams,
its delicious Willamette crawfish—rivaling the best French écrivisses—its
fragrant mammoth strawberries, its juicy cherries, and its world-famed Hood
River apples, it is hardly second to San Francisco as a gastronomic center. In
Oregon, as in Washington and California, the epicure fares particularly well because
the luxuries of life as are cheap as the staples and quite as abundant, if not
more so.”

Henry Finck perceived the manifest culinary advantages of
the Pacific Slope a century ago.

About Me

Richard H. Engeman heads Oregon Rediviva, LLC, a public history research and writing firm. He is the author of "The Oregon Companion" and "Eating It Up in Eden." See his website at www.oregonrediviva.com.